vegas skies
by faith-and-serenity
Summary: the strip glitters at night, but in daylight it tarnishes, Lily understood tarnished, only being pretty in the dark. / in which Lily runs away to Vegas


_For Indy, happy (very very belated) birthday _

The Strip glitters at night, just like all the iconic photographs, the casinos lit up like oversized Christmas trees, Vegas's very own Eiffel Tower looking just as glamorous as its counterpart in France.

In the morning, though, Vegas tarnishes. In the light of day the peeling façades are clear to see, the tarmac chipped, and the Eiffel Tower nothing but a cheap counterfeit. It was this Vegas, however, that was Lily's favourite. She understood tarnished, understood only being pretty in the dark, when most of the people judging you are too drunk to even stagger the five metres from the Casino to their hotel lobby.

She understood the people of Vegas, they were all refugees, seeking shelter in a city of lost souls, the city for those who don't fit in anywhere else. That was why she had chosen it, she could lose herself here, bury Lily Potter and embrace Lily Luna, the most beautiful stripper in Vegas. And she was beautiful, as soon as she donned the gaudy costumes, the rhinestones, the feathers, the heavy makeup, she could look in the mirror and feel beautiful, when she had men stuffing hundred dollar bills down her underwear she felt wanted, for the first time in her life.

She was running late tonight, her coat clutched tight around her, nobody got to see the show unless they paid, and paid well. A little extra cash might get you something more too, but only if you we're lucky and Lily was in the mood, she was the most popular stripper in Nevada, she didn't need to turn to prostitution to survive (but if she wanted to, well, that was a completely different story).

She had left home at sixteen, as soon as her wand had snapped over her mother's knee she had grabbed her coat and walked out, finding a dark corner and apparating to the small cottage on the beach. He had been waiting for her when she got there, his silhouette in the doorway motionless as he watched her make her way up the driveway towards him. She told him that her mother knew everything, that they had to stop, she had to leave, she threatened to go to the Prophet, tell them everything, if he didn't give her a way out.

He smiled ruefully at her blackmail, but in his heart he'd always known the end was going to be something like this, Lily's heart of stone was the reason she'd done so well in Slytherin, why she was so adored by her house, despite her lineage. He pressed a credit card into her hand.

"Muggle money," he told her, brown eyes never leaving green, "I'll pay it off at the end of each month. Only for a year, mind, you need to learn to look after yourself."

She nodded and snatched it out of his hand, turning her back on him in a whirl of bleach blonde hair and creamy skin. She turned back, a second thought, and he saw roots of vibrant red beginning to creep back in, saw just how sunk her eyes were, how hollow her cheeks were, saw that her skin was pallid rather than pale.

"Thanks," she rasped, pulling her cigarettes out of her pocket, "for, y'know. You're a decent guy, Teddy."

He watched her for a minute, shoulders hunched against the cold, cigarette glowing in the dark, before he closed the door and went back to his sleeping wife and son.

Lily had caught the first plane out of England she could find. She had always felt safe in the few airports she had visited, that reminder that every second, every day, there was a plane going anywhere in the world; it comforted her, the knowledge that she could escape at any time, should she want to. She went to New York first, but left as soon as she realised that it was nothing like the movies, instead catching the cross country train to Los Angeles. But LA was too fame focused, the rush reminded her too much of Grimmauld Place, so she withdrew several thousand dollars and left the card with a homeless man - she wasn't stupid enough to think that Teddy wouldn't tell her dad where she was, no matter how angry her dad was with him, and how afraid Teddy was of him right now. She arrived in Vegas two days later and knew she'd found somewhere she could belong. She bought a fake identity, and all the documents that came along with it, Lily Luna, 21, from Dallas, TX, and spent hours in front of motel bathroom mirrors, practising her southern drawl.

She bleached her roots and dyed the ends pink. She found a job, put the deposit down on a one bedroom apartment in the dingiest part of town, started a casual hookup with the bartender at her club. Whenever people asked about her family she told them that she had no siblings, that her parents lived in a Dallas suburb, that she hadn't spoken to them in months.

She started drinking whiskey instead of vodka, wore cowboy boots when she wasn't working and spoke in a Texan drawl without even having to think about it. She was slowly losing her former self, slowly becoming every Vegas cliché, a showgirl drug addict with multicoloured hair and tattoos covering the scars that she carved into herself.

She was late that night because her landlord had come knocking, asking for her rent. She had given him all that she had but she was still $50 short, so he had marched her down to the nearest ATM and watched as her card was swallowed; even Vegas' most popular showgirl didn't earn much above minimum wage, and no matter how many extra jobs she'd worked that month, she still couldn't meet the increase in rent. In desperation she had rushed into the bank and asked the cashier to access the account Teddy had given her, he'd said one year and it'd been three but she was holding onto a desperate thread of hope that told her he wouldn't abandon her completely.

The noise that came out of Lily's mouth when the cashier told her the account was still open was almost a groan, but she gritted her teeth and asked to empty the account. The amount the flashed up on the screen in front of her as the cashier started to type had too many zeros for her to process, she'd known Teddy was desperate to keep her quiet, but the proof of it in front of her made her heart shrivel a little more.

She scrabbled through her purse, realising as she did so that she'd given the card away, what seemed like a life time ago. In desperation her fingers closed around the Ministry ID card she still had from when she used to visit her dad. She'd kept it because she couldn't bear to throw away every part of her old life, and now she was glad of her sentimentality.

"I lost the credit card," she told the cashier as she pushed the ID under the glass.

The woman held the card up for a minute, before pushing it back to Lily and beginning to count out stacks of hundred dollar bills.

Dropping the money into the bag the cashier had given her, Lily went back outside and handed $100 to her landlord, telling him that there was an extra $50 for clearing out whatever was left in her apartment by the end of the next day.

Clutching her the bag tight under her coat, Lily started the walk to work, confident that so long as she was out by midnight, she had time to pick up what she'd earned of that month's wages and pack up what she wanted from her apartment before anyone caught up with her.

Catching a cab back home later that night, Lily moved the cash into a suitcase, and started stuffing clothes and toiletries on top of it, placing the blue teddy her godbrother had given her on the top, and dropping a kiss on his nose ("a teddy from a Teddy" he had joked at the time). Grabbing a bottle of soda, she left the apartment, sparing no sentimental looks for her home for the last two and a half years, dropping her keys in her landlord's mailbox as she left.

She caught the overnight bus from Las Vegas to Austin, the first bus that pulled up to the station. She turned around as they pulled away from the Strip, glittering in the night, a jewel in the middle of the desert, the first place she had ever felt at home. She pulled the drivers license she had bought three years ago out of her back pocket and snapped it. She was starting over. A new Lily for a new city.

She woke up as the bus arrived in Austin, and even her time in Nevada hadn't prepared her for the midday heat. She wrapped her jacket around the handle of her suitcase, stumbling along the sidewalk, still half asleep as she checked into the first motel she came across.

She spent the next day in the office of some dodgy lawyer, handing over a chunk of cash for another identity. She opened a bank account for the money in her suitcase, watching the expression on the bank manager's face when she opened the suitcase go from vaguely patronising to utterly shocked.

She died the pink out of her hair, and had some ridiculously overpriced hairdresser dye it back to her natural colour, red ringlets now snaking their way past her waist.

She bought a small apartment on the outskirts of the city, the driving license she handed to the realtor stating that she was Lily Evans, 19, and then she spent a month holed up learning the American (muggle) high school syllabus and passing her SAT, before enrolling at the University of Texas, Austin.

She carried on wearing cowboy boots, and told everyone that she was from Dallas, that her parents had died and left her all their money. She told stories of her life as a stripper in Vegas, but no-one was ever sure if she was telling the truth or not. The lost soul, who had found the company of other lost souls in Vegas, had found herself in Texas.

And when Lily was sitting in a student coffee bar four years later, her and her three best friends' graduation caps on the table in front of them, and she saw a flash of turquoise hair through the window, she didn't run, or hide, she stayed where she was and waited for him to come to her. And when he did, she didn't scream, or cry, or beg him to let her stay, instead she took his hand in hers, the one with the strip of pale skin where his wedding ring used to be, and kissed him.

"Took you long enough to find me," she smiled, tugging him out of the coffee shop to show him his new home.


End file.
